President Trump likes his tweets. He likes the way Twitter allows him to get unfiltered messages to his followers.

Unfortunately for the nation, so often that message is: “I’m an idiot.”

So it was with the latest attack on California for mismanaging its forests, coupled with a threat to withhold Federal Emergency Management Agency aid for the victims of wildfires.

He’s accused California of mismanaging “its” forests before. We have to assume the last time he said it, someone told him the state of California really doesn’t own much in the way of forests, just 71,000 acres. Sure, there’s lots of forest in California, about 33 million acres, according to the University of California. But 57 percent of that — 19 million acres — is federal land.

That’s Trump’s responsibility. And yeah, he’s not doing a very good job of keeping it up. Local officials and employees of the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Parks understand what needs to be done, but they don’t get much support from Washington.

For example, late last month, Trump issued an executive order calling for fire prevention treatment on more than 4 million acres of federal forest lands. But there was no money made available to do the work, so they were just hollow words.

Worst, the government shutdown has demobilized federal firefighting crews, which usually spend this time of year doing the kind of forest treatments Trump called for in his order. That’s stopped, along with training that might help keep federal firefighters alive when the fire season returns, likely sooner than later.

In other words, the federal effort at improving fire safety on its forests in California is getting worse.

Compare that with the state, which last year approved an extra $200 million a year for the next five years on actually doing fire prevention work. Gov. Newsom, on his second day on the job, added another $105 million for this year.

Newsom also reached out to Trump, offering to cooperate on getting fire safety work completed on federal forest lands, and Trump’s response was the tweet.

The remarkable lack of compassion for the fire victims was no surprise, as Trump has shown what’s almost a pride in being heartless. But the tweet was just plain dumb. My administration is doing a terrible job of managing its forests, but we’re going to blame California and punish the people who suffered because of the terrible job my people are doing?

It’s going to be hard to make progress in the forests unless the president finds his way to reality somehow.